Doctor Kriegspiel

Here's a Dr.Kriegspiel Cartoon (a cartoon series specifically for ENWGS drawn by Bill Cooper of Pacer Systems - one of our IV&V testers on ENWGS). Depicted in this image is what happened when a debug halt occurred during a wargame; the players SCREAM, a programmer (in the image, it's our own chain-smoking Nick Grimes of CSC) dials-in to the process and invokes the debugger, and hopefully he's able to restart the process. Each player is depicted with a standard NWGS two-screen station... a Sanders G7 and a VIP7802... the debug terminal is a VIP7802. The "doors" shown led to the restricted area (the computer room) where the Multics host was located.

Release 2.0 introduced the new 286/386 class workstations, and the old (ICCU PDP-11/03 SBC with Sanders G7 Graphics and VIP7802) workstations were dropped. Also new was the TCD (Tactical Control Directive) Subsystem, an OPS-5 type language that allowed automation of force behavior and tactics. TCDs were developed by Jon Buser, Dr. Joe Sowers, and several others at SDF (Moorestown, NJ) using the Multics Reduction Compiler. They're still a part of ENWGS... having been re-implemented using LEX and YACC on HP-UX.

The authors of this procedure are not (and hope to never be) programmers, therefore there are probably many compile errors - however since the primary users are programmers and therefore have difficulty understanding English, we feel compelled to make an attempt at programming.

Robert Matern adds: BTW, just for information, the suffix on find_party_ee was part of the Government's naming conventions for ENWGS software. The last two letters designate the scope of a logical name. For example: _is means internal static, _es was external static, and _ee means external entry - in other words, a callable entrypoint. This helped to differentiate ENWGS code from Multics code in the KST, in stack traces, and within the debugger environment.

SHAKESPEARIAN MULTICS

Ah, another daye hath bit ye olde dust.
What cometh on the morrow?
Mayhap bugs, those insidious wretches,
Scuttling from 'neath olde lystings.
Or the Spectre of a Crash, 0 glorious Pain.
We are possessed of Daemons, great and small,
Who watch our daily processes, bumping at a whim
Those who hoard not their bits and bytes.
Our lives trickle away down the queue,
To be lost forever in the labyrinth of Rings,
Looping blindly down the corridors of Time.
The objects of our lives are not free,
But are tightly bound
To the Root of the World.
And yet, such is our quota.
We are all terminally ill
And virtually mad.

Robert Matern writes: Don't know who wrote the Shakespearian Multics. We got it from Dave Eastman or Peter Ames (our Honeywell hardware reps), if I recall correctly... about 1987 or so...

TOP TEN REASONS WE'LL MISS THE HONEYWELL

When ENWGS was getting rid of Multics in favor of UNIX systems, this list was posted: